Home Statistics and Visualization Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science Seven-parameter drift-diffusion pdfs and cdfs now in Stan

Seven-parameter drift-diffusion pdfs and cdfs now in Stan

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science 2025-12-11

This post is from Bob.

Drift-diffusion models

Whew. The cdf function for the seven-parameter drift-diffusion model was just merged. The pdf was merged a few months ago. This is a big deal. These pdfs and cdfs are used for in decision-time models in cognitive psychology. There’s a really nice illustration through NLM on nih.gov. The basic idea is that you have a binary task like deciding if an image is red or blue. The data being recorded is time to decision and the decision being made. The underlying generative model is a continuous Wiener diffusion process that has a lag time to get started before drifting with some bias toward opposing decision boundaries. The decision is determined by when it crosses a boundary and which one it crosses (see the illustration). The cdf is important when the task ends before a decision is made, giving you censored observations, which require cdfs or truncated pdfs to implement.

The first time I saw this model being applied was by Bruno Nicenboim and Shravan Vasishth (psycholinguists at Potsdam at the time, though Bruno has since moved to Tilburg) about six or eight years ago. At that point, it took Stan a month or so to fit the model (yes, that’s a month, not a typo)—you may know them as two of the three authors of the really wonderful book, Introduction to Bayesian Data Analysis for Cognitive Science (2025, CRC), which, in its final chapter, covers accumulator models of which the drift-diffusion model is one form. Now these models are very fast in Stan with the new built-in functions.

The pull requests and engineering challenge

Hats off to Franziska Henrich, a cognitive psychologist and Stan developer at the University of Freiburg, aka GitHub user Franzi2114, for writing the code and bearing with Steve Bronder’s hundreds of comments and fixes and my final round of a hundred or so change requests. You can see all the gory details in the discussions around the pull requests and in the code itself.

These pair of functions were perhaps the two hardest functions to get into Stan for a myriad of reasons. The most challenging obstacle beyond the inherent complication of the functions themselves is that our testing framework for densities can’t handle seven-parameter densities. So all the tests had to be projected into subsets of parameters (and seven choose four or five or whatever it was led to a lot of tests). A further difficulty is that to make the arithmetic stable, the code branches all over the place (see the Hartmann and Klaeur article linked below), which also complicates testing.

Some academic background

In addition to Vasishth et al.’s book chapter, there is a vast literature on drift-diffusion models in cognitive psychology and elsewhere. Most relevantly, Franziska wrote an open-access article about the model and the Stan implementation.

Luckily, Hartmann and Klauer provided the derivatives in a previous (closed-access) article.

As is often the case, you can find a pdf through Google Scholar. It’s a daunting pile of mathematics that puts the “M” in “mathematical psychology.” Luckily for us, the authors published an R implementation in package WienR on CRAN (the name is because it’s the Wiener diffusion model underlying the process), which Franziska could use for testing.

Coming to the Stan language next release

We just put out a new Stan release, so we have plenty of time to get the language wrappers around the math library functions before the next release of Stan. Ideally, we’ll also have a User’s Guide chapter with examples of how to use them. We’re always open to new *User’s Guide* chapters about models or methodologies in wide use, and as you can see from this example, we take pull requests, which go down much more easily with the User’s Guide.